There were some concerns here (http://lesswrong.com/lw/2po/selfimprovement_or_shiny_distraction_why_less/) regarding value of LessWrong community from the perspective of instrumental rationality. 

In the discussion on the relevant topic I've seen the story about how community can help  http://lesswrong.com/lw/2p5/humans_are_not_automatically_strategic/2l73 from this perspective.

And I think It's a great thing that local community can help people in various ways to achieve their goals. Also it's not the first time I hear about how this kind of community is helpful as a way of achieving personal goals.

Local LessWrong meetups and communities are great, but they have kind of different focus. And a lot of people live in places where there are no local community or it's not active/regular.

So I propose to form small groups (4-8 people). Initially, groups would meet (using whatever means that are convenient for a particular group), discuss the goals of each participant in a long and in a short term (life/year/month/etc). They would collectively analyze proposed strategies for achieving these goals. Discuss how short term goals align with long term goals. And determine whether the particular tactics for achieving stated goal is optimal. And is there any way to improve on it?

Afterwards, the group would meet weekly to:

Set their short term goals, retrospect on the goals set for previous period. Discuss how successfully they were achieved, what problems people encountered and what alterations to overall strategy follows. And they will also analyze how newly set short-term goals coincide with long-term goals. 

In this way, each member of the group would receive helpful feedback on his goals and on his approach to attaining them. And also he will fill accountable, in a way, for goals, he have stated before the group and this could be an additional boost to productivity.

I also expect that group would be helpful from the perspective of overcoming different kind of fallacies and gaining more accurate beliefs about the world. Because it's easier for people to spot errors in the beliefs/judgment of others. I hope that group's would be able to develop friendly environment and so it would be easier for people to get to know about their errors and change their mind. Truth springs from argument amongst friends.

Group will reflect on it's effectiveness and procedures every month(?) and will incrementally improve itself. Obviously if somebody have some great idea about group proceedings it makes sense to discuss it after usual meeting and implement it right away. But I think regular in-depth retrospective on internal workings is also important.

If there are several groups available - groups will be able to share insights, things group have learned during it's operation. (I'm not sure how much of this kind of insights would be generated, but maybe it would make sense to once in a while publish post that would sum up groups collective insights.)

There are some things that I'm not sure about: 

• I think it would be worth to discuss possibility of shuffling group members (or at least exchanging members in some manner) once in a while to provide fresh insight on goals/problems that people are facing and make the flow of ideas between groups more agile.
• How the groups should be initially formed? Just random assignment or it's reasonable to devise some criteria? (Goals alignment/Diversity/Geography/etc?)

I think initial reglament of the group should be developed by the group, though I guess it's reasonable to discuss some general recommendations.

So what do you think? 

If you interested - fill up this google form:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1IsUQTp_6pGyNglBiPOGDuwdGTBOolAKfAfRrQloYN_o/viewform?usp=send_form

Yesterday I finished transcribing "The Ups and Downs of the Hope Function In a Fruitless Search". This is a statistics & psychology paper describing a simple probabilistic search problem and the sheer difficulty subjects have in producing the correct Bayesian answer. Besides providing a great but simple illustration of the mind projection fallacy in action, the simple search problem maps onto a number of forecasting problems: the problem may be looking in a desk for a letter that may not be there, but we could also look at a problem in which we check every year for the creation of AI and ask how our beliefs change over time - which turns out to defuse a common scoffing criticism of past technological forecasting. (This last problem was why I went back and used it, after I first read of it.)

The math is all simple - arithmetic and one application of Bayes's law - so I think all LWers can enjoy it, and it has amusing examples to analyze. I have also taken the trouble to annotate it with Wikipedia links, relevant materials, and many PDF links (some jailbroken just for this transcript). I hope everyone finds it as interesting as I did.

I thank John Salvatier for doing the ILL request which got me a scan of this book chapter.

I tried to write down my idea a few times, but it was badly wrong each time. Now, Instead of solving the problem, I'm just going to give a more conservative summary of what the problem is.

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Eliezer's talk at the 2011 Singularity Summit focused largely on the AI reflection problem (how to build AI that can prove things about its own proofs, and execute self modifications on the basis of those proofs, without thereby reducing its self modification mojo). To that end, it would be nice to have a "reflection principle" by which an AI (or its theorem prover) can know in a self-referential way that its theorem proving activities are working as they should.

The naive way to do this is to use the standard provability predicate, ◻, which can be thought of as asking whether a proof of a given formula exists. Using this we can try to formalize our intuition that a fully reflective AI, one that can reason about itself in order to improve itself, should understand that its proof deriving behavior does in fact produce sentences derivable from its axioms:

AI ⊢ ◻P → P,

which is intended to be read as "The formal system "AI" understand in general that "If a sentence is provable then it is true" ", though literally it means something a bit more like "It is derivable from the formal system "AI" that "if there exists a proof of sentence P, then P", in general for P".

Surprisingly, attempting to add this to a formal system, like Peano Arithmetic, doesn't work so well. In particular, it was shown by Löb that adding this reflection principle in general lets us derive any statement, including contradictions.

So our nice reflection principle is broken. We don't understand reflective reasoning as well as we'd like. At this point, we can brainstorm some new reflection principles: Maybe our reflection principles should be derivable within our formal system, instead of being tacked on. Also, we can try to figure out in a deeper way why "AI ⊢ ◻P → P" doesn't work: If we can derive all sentences, does that mean that proofs of contradictions actually do exist? If so, why weren't those proofs breaking our theorem provers before we added the reflection principle? Or do the proofs for all sentences only exist for the augmented theorem prover, not for the initial formal system? That would suggest our reflection principle is allowing the AI to trust itself too much, allowing it to derive things because deriving them allows them to be derived. Though it doesn't really look like that if you just stare at the old reflection principle. We are confused. Let's unconfuse ourselves.